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At the heart of the observance of Tisha B'Av -- the annual day of national mourning that marks the destruction of the ancient temples in Jerusalem -- lies the chanting of the biblical book of Lamentations. A collection of five distinct poems of lament, Lamentations -- or Eichah in Hebrew -- serves as the source for our tradition's language of...

The holiday of Tisha B'Av is not on every Jewish person's radar, but it should be. The one holiday that hits us in the heat of summer, Tisha B'Av -- which begins this year on the evening of July 29 -- is a fast day that commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem in 586 BCE...

When he was accused of incessantly harping on the past, Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel responded: "Jews don't live in the past, but the past lives in us." The Jewish calendar does not just mark dates and events; it records the demeanor and tone of the Jewish people at any given time. The month that we have entered...

Throughout history, the Jewish people have wrestled with the questions of who we are. Are we a religion, as distinguished from Catholics, Protestants and Muslims? Are we a nation, as distinguished from those who are ethnically French, Italian or Chinese? Are we both a religion and a national ethnic group at the same time, making us somewhat unusual in today's...

In the first weeks after Katrina, when my husband and I would worry out loud about our home or our "stuff," our 14-year-old son would admonish us, "Look, you are so much better off than those people in the Superdome. You shouldn't feel sorry for yourself." And he was right. We evacuated without enduring suffering, my husband still had his...